News Flashes

Oracle announced two x86 world record benchmark results delivered by its software and hardware. An x86 world record result was achieved on the SPECjEnterprise2010 benchmark, with Oracle WebLogic Server 12c, Oracle Database 11g Release 2, running Oracle Linux on Oracle's Sun Fire X4800 M2 server. In addition, an x86 world record TPC-C benchmark result was set with the Sun Fire X4800 M2 server, running Oracle Linux with the Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel Release 2, Oracle Tuxedo, and Oracle Database 11g Release 2.

Attivio and TIBCO Software Inc. have announced that, as part of a new partnership agreement, the TIBCO Spotfire analytics platform has achieved the highest level of information access available within Attivio's Active Intelligence Engine (AIE). According to Attivio, its AIE ingests all types of structured data and unstructured content, and unlike a traditional data warehouse, does not require relationships between any data or content to be defined in advance prior to ingestion. In achieving platinum-level certification, Attivio says TIBCO Spotfire has been authenticated by Attivio to be able to present, analyze, access and leverage AIE's AI-SQL capabilities to provide data visualization, enhanced analytics of unstructured content and intuitive search and discovery, all in the same dashboard.

Commercial open source integration software vendor Talend has extended its partnership with Jaspersoft, a provider of business intelligence software, to deliver native support for big data environments in Jaspersoft ETL. Jaspersoft ETL, part of the larger Jaspersoft BI Suite 4.5, is now able to move data from any source into and out of Apache Hadoop and other big data platforms, regardless of format. Together, these technologies integrate enterprise data with big data platforms to provide actionable business intelligence quickly and precisely.

IBM has introduced DB2 10 and InfoSphere Warehouse 10 software that integrates with big data systems, automatically compresses data into tighter spaces to prevent storage sprawl, and slices information from the past, present, and future to eliminate expensive application code. Over the past 4 years, more than 100 clients, 200 business partners, and hundreds of experts from IBM Research and Software Development Labs around the world collaborated to develop the new software.

Objectivity, Inc. and Database Trends and Applications will present a webcast on the latest trends in big data analytics on Thursday April 12 at 9 am PT/ 12 noon ET. The webcast will cover the definition of big data and explain how to maximize existing architectures by utilizing NoSQL technologies to improve functionality and provide real-time results. There will be a focus on relationship analytics as well as an introduction to NoSQL data stores, object and graph databases, such as the architecture behind Objectivity/DB and InfiniteGraph.

Quest Software, Inc. has announced the availability of vFundamentals, a new product suite that delivers backup, capacity planning and resource optimization for VMware virtual environments. vFundamentals is intended to enable virtualization administrators to grow their virtual environments knowing that critical assets are properly utilized and protected. The new bundle includes Quest vRanger Pro, a VMware backup, replication and recovery solution, as well as capacity management and optimization technology from VKernel's vOps Server Standard Edition. VKernel was acquired in November 2011 by Quest.

Organizations are rapidly increasing cloud adoption and maturity. According to the 2012 OAUG survey on cloud applications adoption, 51% of respondents now have between 1 and 5 years of experience in the cloud. Attend this upcoming OAUG webcast on Tuesday, April 17, at 10 am PT/ 1 pm ET to gain insight into strategies for leveraging the cloud for key business systems and learn how your peers are planning for and implementing cloud-based solutions. Attendees will hear directly from the report authors and OAUG president Mark Clark for unique insight into what OAUG members are doing in the cloud.

10gen, a sponsor of the open source non-relational database MongoDB, and Red Hat, a provider of open source solutions, have announced new areas of collaboration and the joint development of best practices and blueprint reference designs for deploying MongoDB across Red Hat offerings, including the Red Hat Enterprise Linux enterprise operating system, Red Hat's Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) OpenShift and Red Hat JBoss middleware solutions.

Many IT developers have built complex and lengthy PL/SQL scripts to perform critical data processing tasks as a result of underperforming ETL tools, but as business requirements change and data volumes grow, the need to tune, maintain and extend thousands of PL/SQL lines can hinder agility and increase costs. Watch the replay of this webcast presentation to learn how the National Education Association and other organizations have succeeded in optimizing their PL/SQL environments to enhance performance, maximize business agility, and reduce costs.

Oracle Corporation announced that GAAP total revenues for fiscal 2012 Q3, which ended Feb. 28, were up 3% to $9.0 billion, and non-GAAP total revenues were up 3% to $9.1 billion. Among the highlights for the quarter were Oracle's engineered systems. Hardware revenue for engineered systems grew 139% in the third quarter and bookings are strong going into the fourth quarter, said Oracle president Mark Hurd in a statement released by the company with the announcement of its quarterly financial results.

First introduced at Oracle OpenWorld, the Oracle Exalytics In-Memory Machine, a high-speed engineered system featuring in-memory business intelligence software and hardware, is now generally available. Oracle Exalytics features Oracle BI Foundation Suite 11.6, which includes 87 new product capabilities and enhancements, and Oracle TimesTen In-Memory Database for Exalytics, enhanced for an Oracle Sun server designed for in-memory analytics. Exalytics has had the fastest launch of any engineered system that Oracle has introduced and is already being well accepted in the U.S. and Europe, and ramping up now in Asia, said Mark Hurd, Oracle president, during the company's recent third quarter earnings call.

Organizational focus has been placed on the emergence of "big data" - large-scale data sets that businesses and governments use to create new value with today's computing and communications power. Big data poses many opportunities, but managing the rapid growth adds challenges, including complexity and cost. Leaders must address the implications of big data, increasing volume and detail of information captured by enterprises, the rise of multimedia, social media, and the internet.

SAS has released a new high-performance, in-memory solution that employs a visual interface to bring SAS analytics to a greater number of big data consumers, including business users. With Hadoop support and extensive avenues for information-delivery, including the iPad, SAS Visual Analytics is expected to help business and IT users alike make better-informed decisions and increase productivity. The solution is the newest product in the SAS High Performance Analytics family. Along with the ability to share big data insights at near-instant speeds on multiple platforms, Randy Guard, vice president of product management at SAS, tells 5 Minute Briefing that the interface for the new solution provides "a point-and-click/drag-and-drop environment."

McAfee, a security technology company, is offering a free downloadable audit plug-in for MySQL databases that records full activity audits, which are often required for enterprises to satisfy certain standards and regulations. The plug-in is designed to supplement McAfee's Database Activity Monitoring sensor. In combination, the plug-in and sensor can offer real-time analysis and policy enforcement for small and medium businesses as well as large enterprises.

ClearStory Data has announced an investment from Google Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz, Khosla Ventures as well as individual investors. The company aims to help business users conduct self-driven big data exploration - making it easier to gather and explore big, diverse, dispersed data from corporate data sources, Hadoop and the web so that they can gain quick insights and discover new business opportunities. "In 2011, the global output of data increased 62%, yet there's a massive shortage in the number of qualified data professionals to process this data," said Sharmila Shahani-Mulligan, CEO and founder of ClearStory Data.

MapR Technologies, Inc., provider of the MapR distribution for Apache Hadoop, has introduced new data connection options for Hadoop to enable a range of data ingress and egress alternatives for customers. These include direct file-based access using standard tools and file-based applications, direct database connectivity, Hadoop specific connectors via Sqoop, Flume and Hive; as well as direct access to popular data warehouses and applications using custom connectors. Additionally, technology providers Pentaho and Talend are partnering with MapR to provide direct integration with MapR's distribution, and MapR has also entered into a partnership with data warehouse and business intelligence platform vendor Tableau Software.

HP has announced a new line of Application Transformation solutions that target the need to integrate consumer-led technologies into enterprise systems. The expanded portfolio is intended to help clients to design, build and manage applications that support consumer-driven solutions entering the enterprise realm, including smartphones, mobile applications, and social networking platforms. "Modern enterprise applications require a different approach to design and testing than traditional applications," says Jonathan Rende, vice president and general manager for application transformation solutions at HP.

Symantec Corp. plans to announce, on Tuesday, a new solution intended to help organizations improve storage I/O performance and availability for VMware vSphere implementations. The product, Veritas Dynamic Multi-Pathing for VMware, is designed to help companies increase I/O performance, increase visibility and improve management of underlying storage, as well as enhance the availability of the virtual machine and applications. "Organizations are moving mission-critical applications to VMware, but when they do that, they add certain SLAs or performance requirements that they have to meet," Dan Lamorena, director of product marketing for Symantec's Storage and Availability Management Group, tells 5 Minute Briefing.

Compuware Corporation and Rosetta, part of the Publicis Groupe and a member of the Compuware Partner Network, announced a partnership designed to help customers ensure high performance with their e-commerce sites. The integrated offering offers pre-production testing and ongoing application performance management.

GT Software, a provider of enterprise modernization solutions, announced availability of a new version of its legacy modernization suite, which includes support for JCA Resource Adapters and a new IMS/TM Application Wizard.

gen-E (formerly generationE Technologies), an IT process automation software company, has received a private equity investment from Solis Capital Partners, enabling the company to expand its data center solutions business across new channels. The vendor's Resolve Social ITPA software, first launched in 2009, combines automation with social media-powered collaboration and knowledge management capabilities to help companies break down traditional organizational and process constraints.

KPMG LLP, a financial advisory firm, and Apptio, a provider of technology business management solutions, are working together in a concerted effort to beef up clients' IT operations. KPMG will leverage Apptio's enterprise software as a service (SaaS) platform, as well as its applications in IT strategy and CIO advisory engagements to help clients better understand how costs are flowing through their IT infrastructures.

Sybase 365, a subsidiary of Sybase, Inc., has unveiled its next generation Mobile Commerce platform. With the updated platform, Sybase 365 seeks to enhance the customer engagement experience that financial institutions and mobile operators can offer their end-users, by providing a complete set of rich features for mobile banking, mobile payments and mobile money services - on a single platform. The Sybase mobile commerce platform has been architected to meet increasing demands as mobile commerce moves from a minor service to a mainstream service offered to a vast array of customers worldwide.

Simba Technologies Inc., a provider of relational and multi-dimensional data connectivity solutions, has announced that its JDBC Driver for SalesForce.com has been licensed by SAP AG. The solution enables advanced, cloud-based reporting and analysis on SalesForce CRM data in real-time. Simba's JDBC Driver for SalesForce.com will be included with the SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence (BI) OnDemand solution to provide live connectivity to SalesForce.com.

For 2012, the traditional TechWave content will be incorporated into SAP TechEd, October 15-19 at the Venetian Hotel in Las Vegas, NV. There will continue to be targeted training on Sybase products, plus access to TechEd keynote sessions, exhibits, special event and other networking functions.

Helping customers manage the influx of mobile devices, networks and applications in the enterprise, SAP has unveiled a new release of the Afaria mobile device management solution. With the 7.0 release of Afaria, SAP aims to allow enterprise IT to more effectively manage mobile applications and devices through a new user interface (UI) for simplified administration, improved workflow and enterprise integration capabilities. "The consumerization of IT is driving our innovation path and commitment to providing customers with the industry's most comprehensive, robust and streamlined mobility management platform, including mobile device management," says Sanjay Poonen, president, Global Solutions, SAP.

Oracle has unveiled release 20.2 of Oracle AutoVue, an enterprise visualization solution to help customers in the energy, public sector, high tech and manufacturing industries increase operational efficiency and capitalize on information. "The goal is really to unlock the technical data and let it flow throughout the lifecycle so people can make the best decisions possible," Celine Beck, manager of Product Management and Strategy, Oracle AutoVue, tells 5 Minute Briefing.

Oracle has announced that its Sun ZFS Storage 7320 appliance has extended its storage leadership by delivering outstanding performance on the SPECsfs2008_nfs benchmark. The Sun ZFS Storage 7320 appliance achieved 134,140 SPEC SFS2008_nfs ops/sec at an Overall Response Time of 1.51 milliseconds for file serving in a mixed workload environment. "This SPECsfs2008 result is further proof that the Sun ZFS Storage Appliance delivers a significant increase in performance at a fraction of the cost of competitive solutions,"says Phil Bullinger, senior vice president, Storage, Oracle.

Citrusleaf, a real-time, distributed NoSQL database technology provider, has announced the immediate availability of Cross Datacenter Replication (XDR), a new product that enables flexibility for running real-time applications easily and seamlessly from different data centers. XDR runs on Citrusleaf 2.0, the company's flagship database platform for high-volume, data-intensive, web-scale and mobile businesses such as digital advertising.

Entrinsik Inc., developer of information management solutions, has announced the winners of its 2012 Operational Business Intelligence (BI) Awards. The awards were presented at a networking luncheon at the 2012 Informer User Conference (ICON) held this year at the Raleigh Marriott City Center in beautiful Raleigh, NC. "Informer is an easy to use, quick to implement operational BI solution designed to support decision making with hard facts, and we've received a flood of award submissions from customers describing in detail how Informer does just that," says Sharon Shelton, vice president of marketing at Entrinsik.

Registration for U2 University 2012 - Denver is now open. Rocket Software's premier customer event for product and technical training will be held May 8-10 at the Ritz Carlton in downtown Denver. This year's event will include informative lectures, more labs than last year, and the popular certification exams that are free with registration. Attendees will be able to meet with members of the Rocket U2 staff and event sponsors, and to network with other U2 customers.

Clinical Data Management (CDM) is a company headquartered in Colorado that provides clinical information database software, enabling medical institutions to report and compile data on patient care. A longtime user of Revelation Software, dating back to Revelation G and continuing through OpenInsight, CDM was pleased with both the quality of the products and the service from Revelation. However, CDM had come to realize it needed to provide a web interface for data entry to better support its customers and also stay current with evolving technology requirements. That need was answered when Revelation launched the OpenInsight for Web (O4W) Development Toolkit, a web development toolkit that makes it possible for OpenInsight developers with limited or no HTML, XML or JavaScript experience to develop feature-rich web pages.

Valuable data and trusted applications are dependent on MultiValue databases at many organizations, but there is also a need to integrate that data and those applications with other systems and provide access to users in new ways. In this special section, DBTA asks leading MultiValue vendors:What is your organization doing to help customers modernize and stay current with new technologies to address the evolving requirements of customers?

Many IT developers have built complex and lengthy PL/SQL scripts to perform critical data processing tasks as a result of underperforming ETL tools. However, as business requirements change and data volumes grow, the need to tune, maintain and extend thousands of PL/SQL lines can hinder agility and increase costs. Join DBTA and Syncsort for a live webcast on Thursday, March 29, at 12 noon ET/ 9 am PT, to learn how the National Education Association and other organizations are optimizing their PL/SQL environments to enhance performance, maximize business agility, and reduce costs.

Schooner Information Technology, Inc., a developer of high-availability, high-performance SQL database software, has released the latest version of its software cache and persistent data store, Membrain 4.0. Running on Dell, HP, and IBM x86 servers and optimized to take advantage of flash memory and modern multi-core processors, the latest release of Membrain aims to deliver 10x server consolidation, thus simplifying capacity and performance scale out in data centers.

RainStor, a provider of big data management software, is joining with IBM in the big data market. RainStor will work with IBM to deliver a solution that combines IBM's enterprise-class, Hadoop-based product, InfoSphere BigInsights, with RainStor's Big Data Analytics on Hadoop product to enable faster, more flexible analytics on multi-structured data, without the need to move data out of the Hadoop environment. According to the vendors, the new combined solution can reduce the TCO for customers by significantly reducing physical storage, and also improving the performance of querying and analyzing big data sets across the enterprise.

Gazzang, Inc., a provider of cloud-enabling, platform-as-a-service products, has released a new encryption and key management platform that secures organizations' big data against the threat of a breach or attack. Named the Gazzang Encryption Platform for Big Data, it protects data stored in Hadoop, Cassandra and MongoDB.

1010data, Inc., provider of an internet-based big data warehouse, has announced the launch of a new software tool that enables 1010data's customers to automatically segment and analyze huge consumer transaction databases and produce statistical models with specificity, even to the level of social groups, families and individuals. For the first stage of the launch, 1010data is making the tool available in an invitational beta release for retail, consumer goods, and mobile telecom companies. "In all consumer-driven industries, customers are demanding to be treated as individuals, not boomers, tweeners, or dinks - dual income, no kids," said Tim Negris, vice president of marketing at 1010data.

IBM has announced new consulting services and software to address the emerging opportunities of big data to manage financial operations, decrease fraud and improve customer relationships. The new solutions target the highest-priority issues of C-suite decision makers and combine innovations developed by IBM Research with new predictive technologies from dozens of companies IBM has acquired.

Datameer, Inc., a provider of end user analytics solutions built on Apache Hadoop, has introduced Datameer 1.4, which adds new functionality in the areas of data management including partitioning, user and data security as well as expanded support for data source adaptors, and support for new versions of Hadoop from Cloudera and IBM. "This release is our most ambitious engineering effort since Version 1.0 and was driven primarily by input from our customers," said Stefan Groschupf, CEO of Datameer.

DataStax, which offers products and services based on the open source database Apache Cassandra, has announced DataStax Enterprise 2.0 (DSE 2.0), a big data solution designed to manage real-time, analytic, as well as enterprise search data, all in the same database cluster. With the updated platform, DataStax aims to deliver a comprehensive, integrated data management solution that manages real-time data with Cassandra, provides batch analytic capabilities with Apache Hadoop, and enables enterprise search on the same data with Apache Solr. "Enterprise search is a high-demand capability, and open source Apache Solr is the most popular open source search technology available," said Billy Bosworth, CEO, DataStax.

IBM has added Cognos Insight to its line of business analytics solutions, providing a solution for business users that increasingly seek to access, explore, analyze, visualize, and share data quickly and easily without the assistance of enterprise IT. With data discovery and visualization emerging as one of the fastest-growing segments of the business analytics market, IBM Cognos Insight aims to responsibly place more power in the hands of enterprise business users.

All the major extensions to the Spring Framework are now compatible with Spring 3.1, the latest version of the open source Java development framework, according to VMware. Spring Integration, Spring Security, Spring Batch, Spring Data, Spring Mobile and Spring for Android all now support Spring 3.1, making it easier and faster for enterprise developers to build the next generation of enterprise applications. "The latest release of the Spring Framework and its major extensions continue the tradition of taking care of the infrastructure so developers can focus on building applications that address today's business requirements," Adrian Colyer, CTO Cloud and Application Services, VMware.

SAS, a provider of business analytics software and services, has updated its Enterprise Data Integration Server to include support for the popular open source data framework Apache Hadoop. This integration not only brings the power of SAS analytics to Hadoop, but also makes it easier for SAS customers to use and manage Hadoop effectively along with their existing data sources, thus enhancing the value of customers' big data.

As IT departments strive to lower costs while operating more efficiently organizations are seeking efficient ways to ensure that data in their VMware environments is properly protected, according to Quest Software and ExaGrid Systems, which are marketing a joint virtual data protection solution. Using Quest vRanger in tandem with ExaGrid's disk backup appliance, the vendors say, provides customers with an efficient, disk-based backup solution tailored to meet the specific needs of VMware virtual environments.

Social media business intelligence is on the rise, according to a new Unisphere Research study sponsored by IBM and Marist College. The study found that while social media monitoring and analysis is in its early stages, many organizations plan to monitor, collect, stage and analyze this data over the next 1 to 5 years and. In particular, LOB respondents, who are closer to customers, show appreciation for the benefits of monitoring SMNs.

At last week's SHARE conference in Atlanta, CA Technologies announced the first five recipients of $35,000 scholarships to its Mainframe Academy, an accelerated educational curriculum that helps promising young technologists expand their skills and fill potential talent gaps in future mainframe management. CA announced the scholarship program last March as part of its workforce education effort, promising over $1 million in grants to attend the Mainframe Academy through 2016. Recipients are selected by SHARE representatives, who award scholarships to applicants that demonstrate a desire to master mainframe programming skills.

Serena Software announced enhanced offerings that help automate, control and instrument important application development and operations processes to deliver DevOps and Orchestrated IT. DevOps is the growing practice of developers and operations teams working in tandem to roll out and manage applications, and Serena defines "Orchestrated IT" as IT management systems that tie together existing tools into a more streamlined process-driven human workflow.

IBM has announced new software to beef up its SmartCloud line of management and monitoring tools for cloud deployments. IBM's new SmartCloud Foundation offerings enable organizations to install, manage, configure and automate the creation of cloud services in private, public or hybrid environments with enhanced levels of control, the vendor says.